“I doubt that 2,000 datasets are even sufficient when we think of the gamut of possible variables involved in autism,” Di Martino says. Di Martino says she realizes that the collection must continue to grow to address autism’s heterogeneity. Di Martino says she plans to meet with the site investigators next year to standardize the data collection.Įven with 2,000 scans, the database doesn’t offer enough power for some types of analyses.ĭi Martino and her team released the new brain scans in June and plan to release behavioral and other details about the participants later this year. Others note that the new version doesn’t address the problems with inconsistency in scanning methods at the different sites. Schaer is not involved in ABIDE but has used some of the scans for her research. “We need imaging data to know when brain development starts to diverge in those diagnosed with autism,” she says. “We know that the first three years of life represent a window of opportunity, when therapeutic interventions yield the most optimal long-term benefits,” says Marie Schaer, visiting assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University in California. For example, it has few scans from children with severe autism and none from children under age 5. There are some lingering concerns about the database. Pelphrey’s laboratory contributes scans to ABIDE.
The richer dataset will allow researchers to ask detailed questions about differences among people with autism, says Kevin Pelphrey, director of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The additional information may put researchers in a better position to understand why autism sometimes occurs with other conditions. The new collection contains more detailed clinical data, says Di Martino, including information about the participants’ other psychiatric diagnoses, social skills and repetitive behaviors. This time, researchers also added detailed snapshots of the brain’s structure and connectivity, with data from structural MRI and diffusion tensor imaging. The new version adds data from another 1,044 people, 557 of whom have autism. They also provided clinical information about each individual, such as his or her age, sex and intelligence quotient.
Researchers obtained the scans while participants rested inside the scanner, which highlights activity in the default brain network. Twice as nice:ĪBIDE’s original iteration hosts functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 539 people with autism and 573 controls. “The sample size alone starts to make replication across sites feasible,” says Jeffrey Anderson, assistant professor of neuroradiology at the University of Utah, who led the 2013 study. It may help to ease some of the concerns that have dogged the database. The new collection is funded by a $210,000 grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health. “You can combine data from and have a sufficiently large sample,” says the database’s co-founder Adriana Di Martino, assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. Responding to those reports, ABIDE’s creators are doubling down on their effort: In June, they launched the newest version of the database, adding more than 1,000 new scans and eight new sites. And last year, another team reported that the differences in scanners at separate labs are significant enough to lead to false findings. For example, a 2013 study found that scans in ABIDE are more variable than those from a single research center. Many researchers have said the collection is too small and variable to spot signals in the noisy data. The open-access resource, dubbed the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE), was set to power up studies with scans from 1,112 people at 17 centers.ĭozens of studies have since used ABIDE, but reviews of the scans have been mixed. It’s been three years since researchers unveiled the world’s biggest bank of brain imaging data from people with autism. Autism research - and science in general - is constantly evolving, so older articles may contain information or theories that have been reevaluated since their original publication date. This article is more than five years old.
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